The Faithful Watchman Chronicles the Ride of the Four Horsemen

In Revelation 1:10 The Apostle John states that he was "in the spirit on the Lord's day (the day of the Lord)." Revelation 1:19 states, "Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter." Therefore, the seven seals which are opened in Revelation occur in the day of the Lord.

The first four seals are commonly referred to as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Faithful Watchman chronicles the ride of these horsemen as an educational service for the public and a warning for those who have ears to hear (Rev. 2:7).

The Church of God's Faithful can prove that the day of the Lord has begun. For more information about The Day of the Lord and the ride of the Four Horsemen visit our website at setapartbytruth.org

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Tag: GDP

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas is sounding the alarm over the current trajectory of the U.S. national debt, which is projected to grow to $30 trillion within a decade.

Robert Kaplan wrote, in an essay published by the government bank on Wednesday:

“Unfortunately, while the U.S. consumer has deleveraged since the Great Recession, business debt as a percentage of GDP has increased, and U.S. government debt levels have increased substantially. While increased business debt is likely manageable, U.S. government debt held by the public is now 75 percent of GDP, and the present value of underfunded entitlements is now approximately $49 trillion. There is a legitimate concern that the projected path of U.S. government debt relative to GDP is unlikely to be sustainable.”

The federal government is now 20.4 trillion dollars in debt, and most Americans don’t seem to care that the economic prosperity that we are enjoying today could be completely destroyed by our exploding national debt. Over the past decade, the national debt has been growing at a rate of more than 100 million dollars an hour, and this is a debt that all of us owe. When you break it down, each American citizen’s share of the debt is more than $60,000, and so if you have a family of five your share is more than $300,000. And when you throw in more than 6 trillion dollars of corporate debt and nearly 13 trillion dollars of consumer debt, it is not inaccurate to say that we are facing a crisis of unprecedented magnitude.

Debt cannot grow much faster than GDP indefinitely. At some point the bubble bursts, and when it does the pain that the middle class is going to experience is going to be off the charts. Back in 2015, the middle class in the U.S. became a minority of the population for the first time ever. Never before in our history has the middle class accounted for less than 50 percent of the population, and all over the country formerly middle class families are under a great deal of stress as they attempt to make ends meet.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and through the mechanism of government debt virtually the entire planet has become the servants of the global money changers. Politicians love to borrow money, but over time government debt slowly but surely impoverishes a nation. As the elite get governments around the globe in increasing amounts of debt, those governments must raise taxes in order to keep servicing those debts. In the end, it is all about taking money from us and transferring it into government pockets, and then taking money from government pockets and transferring it into the hands of the elite. It is a game that has been going on for generations, and it is time for humanity to say that enough is enough.

According to the Institute of International Finance, global debt has now reached a new all-time record high of 217 trillion dollars…

Global debt levels have surged to a record $217 trillion in the first quarter of the year. This is 327 percent of the world’s annual economic output (GDP), reports the Institute of International Finance (IIF).

The surging debt was driven by emerging economies, which have increased borrowing by $3 trillion to $56 trillion. This amounts to 218 percent of their combined economic output, five percentage points greater year on year.

Never before in human history has our world been so saturated with debt.

Have you ever thought about what comes after the bubble? In 2008 we got a short preview of what life will be like, but most Americans seem to have come to the conclusion that the last financial crisis was just a minor bump in the road toward endless economic prosperity. But of course the truth is that the ridiculously high debt-fueled standard of living that we are enjoying now is not sustainable, and after this bubble bursts it will be an extremely painful adjustment for our society.

Since the last financial crisis, the U.S. national debt has nearly doubled, corporate debt has doubled, stock valuations have reached exceedingly ridiculous extremes, the student loan debt bubble has surpassed a trillion dollars, we are facing the largest unfunded pension crisis in U.S. history, and in many parts of the country (particularly the west coast) we are facing a housing bubble that is even worse than the one that burst in 2007 and 2008.

And even with all of these bubbles, U.S. GDP growth has been absolutely anemic. Even if you believe the grossly manipulated numbers that the federal government puts out, the U.S. economy grew at a “miserably low” rate of just 1.6 percent in 2016…

Federal debt held by the public is set to hit 77 percent of gross domestic product by the end of this year, the highest level seen since shortly after World War II, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s 2017 long-term budget outlook.

Federal debt held by the public, defined as the amount that the federal government borrows from financial markets, has ballooned over the last decade. In 2007, the year the recession began, debt held by the public represented 35 percent of GDP. Just five years later, federal debt held by the public has doubled to 70 percent and is projected to continue rising.

Debt has not seen a surge this large since the increase in federal spending during World War II, when debt exceeded 70 percent of GDP. The budget office projects that growing budget deficits will cause the debt to increase sharply over the next three decades, hitting 150 percent of GDP by 2047.

When debt grows much faster than GDP for an extended period of time, it is inevitable that a good portion of that debt will start to go bad at some point. We witnessed a perfect example of this in 2008, and now it is starting to happen again. Commercial bankruptcies have been rising on a year-over-year basis since late 2015, and this is something that I have written about previously, but now consumer bankruptcies are also increasing. In fact, we have just witnessed U.S. consumer bankruptcies do something that they haven’t done in nearly 7 years. The following comes from Wolf Richter…

US bankruptcy filings by consumers rose 5.4% in January, compared to January last year, to 52,421 according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. In December, they’d already risen 4.5% from a year earlier. This was the first time that consumer bankruptcies increased back-to-back since 2010.

However, business bankruptcies began to surge in November 2015 and continued surging on a year-over-year basis in 2016, to reach a full-year total of 37,823 filings, up 26% from the prior year and the highest since 2014.

Of course consumer bankruptcies are still much lower than they were during the last financial crisis, but what this could mean is that we have reached a turning point.

For years, the Federal Reserve has been encouraging reckless borrowing and spending by pushing interest rates to ultra-low levels. Unfortunately, this created an absolutely enormous debt bubble, and now that debt bubble is beginning to burst.

A new report on the economy finds that productivity growth is at a 50-year low and that much of the positive talk about the nation’s financial situation in the last election, much of it coming from the administration, was a lie.

The report from the U.S. Council on Competitiveness and Gallup finds that for many, the economy is in reverse despite claims that there is an active recovery ongoing, complete with new jobs.

“Conventional wisdom — as reported in many major newspapers and media — tells us the U.S. economy is ‘recovering.’ Well-meaning economists, academics and government officials use the term ‘recovery’ when discussing the economy, implying that growth is getting stronger. The study finds there is no recovery. Since 2007, U.S. GDP per capita growth has been 1,” according to Gallup Chairman Jim Clifton.

“As this report makes clear,” added Council President Deborah Wince-Smith, “productivity growth is in a serious multi-decade-long slump that is dangerously close to stalling completely.”

WTO officials on Tuesday dramatically cut the organization’s 2016 global trade forecast by more than a percentage point, citing a marked slowing of GDP growth in many nations, including pivotal emerging economies.

The WTO estimated that global trade would expand by just 1.7 percent in 2016, compared with its April projection of 2.8 percent, and compared with a projection a year ago that trade would swell by 3.9 percent this year.

The UN agency also revised down its 2017 forecast, with trade expected to grow between 1.8 percent and 3.1 percent, down from the previously anticipated 3.6 percent for next year.

Statistical rating agency Fitch has estimated that China may face a massive banking system crisis, as the number of China’s toxic loans may be ten times higher than Beijing says.

According to the agency’s Tuesday report, up to 21 percent of China’s loan pool is “non-performing loans,” (NPLs) which means debtors are struggling to make the repayments. At the same time, only 1.8 percent of loans were classified as bad ones by state authorities last June.

Moreover, Beijing’s reliance on credit growth for providing near-term GDP increase could exacerbate existing problems, Fitch stressed, as it “will increase the size of asset-quality problems in the financial system.”

The pinnacle of the global financial system is warning that conditions are right for a “full-blown banking crisis” in China. Since the last financial crisis, there has been a credit boom in China that is really unprecedented in world history. At this point the total value of all outstanding loans in China has hit a grand total of more than 28 trillion dollars. That is essentially equivalent to the commercial banking systems of the United States and Japan combined. While it is true that government debt is under control in China, corporate debt is now 171 percent of GDP, and it is only a matter of time before that debt bubble horribly bursts. The situation in China has already grown so dire that the Bank for International Settlements is sounding the alarm…

A key gauge of credit vulnerability is now three times over the danger threshold and has continued to deteriorate, despite pledges by Chinese premier Li Keqiang to wean the economy off debt-driven growth before it is too late.

The Bank for International Settlements warned in its quarterly report that China’s “credit to GDP gap” has reached 30.1, the highest to date and in a different league altogether from any other major country tracked by the institution.